Rome and Athens are chilly while the islands just south of Nova Zembla are above zero.I think to expect billions to hang in here on Earth after an abrupt CC is uptimistic, millions maybe.Look at how fragile this modern society is, to go medieval in a decade or another step back hunter gatherer within a few years?Most of humanity lives in cities, say 4 billion, if 2% makes it for another generation that equals 80 million.Towns and countryside, farms and homesteads, make that a double, 4% and another 160 million.People that are already geared for survival, special forces, preppers, elite or natives 10% to last a bit longer.Doomsteads/bunkers/expert hunters.....50 million people give or take, 5 million that make it.Adds up to 245 million, still very optimistic I think.....millions but billions will be a thing, folly of the past, history.

Think of a worldwide powerdown and see how long mammals last, no freezer, no transport, no information, no nothing as usual.

Depopulation: Societal collapse is almost always associated with a population decline. In extreme cases, the collapse in population is so severe that the society disappears entirely, such as happened with the Greenland Vikings, or a number of Polynesian islands. In less extreme cases, populations are reduced until a demographic balance is re-established between human societies and the depleted natural environment. A classic example is the city of Rome, which had a population of about 1.5 million at the peak of the Roman Empire during the reign of Trajan in the early 2nd century AD, but in the Early Middle Ages the population had declined to only around 15,000 inhabitants by the 9th century.

City of Rome, 1% from peak to village.

Modern social critics commonly interpret things like sedentary social behavior as symptomatic of societal decay, and link what appears to be laziness with the depletion of important non-renewable resources. However, many primitive cultures also have high degrees of leisure, so if that is a cause in one place it may not be in another—leisure or apparent laziness is then not a sufficient cause. What produces modern sedentary life, unlike nomadic hunter-gatherers, is extraordinary modern economic productivity. Tainter argues that exceptional productivity is actually more the sign of hidden weakness, both because of a society's dependence on it, and its potential to undermine its own basis for success by not being self limiting as demonstrated in Western culture's ideal of perpetual growth. As a population grows and technology makes it easier to exploit depleting resources, the environment's diminishing returns are hidden from view. Societal complexity is then potentially threatened if it develops beyond what is actually sustainable, and a disorderly reorganization were to follow. The scissors model of Malthusian collapse, where the population grows without limit and resources do not, is the idea of great opposing environmental forces cutting into each other. For the modern world economy, for example, the growing conflict between food and fuel, depending on many of the same finite and diminishing resources, is visible in recent major commodity price shocks. It is one of the key relationships researchers, since the early studies of the Club of Rome, have been most concerned with. Jared Diamond pursues these themes in his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.[15]

The downpours swamped a number of streets, trapping many drivers in their cars; they have also soaked subway stations, forcing the closure of at least six of them, mostly in eastern parts of the city. All stations had reopened by Monday morning, The Local reports.

last year at the end, but trouble today again, news on the Dutch telly.

The US remains by a very long shot the country that is directly responsible for the largest total emissions of the gas that is plunging the earth into a permanent scorching heatwave...not what I'd call the most environmentally responsible nation on earth.

dohboi wrote:The US remains by a very long shot the country that is directly responsible for the largest total emissions of the gas that is plunging the earth into a permanent scorching heatwave...not what I'd call the most environmentally responsible nation on earth.

You can parse the emissions data in a number of ways. If you do it on a per capita basis then England has the highest per capita emissions. If you look at current emissions then China is the largest current CO2 producer.

I think the most productive way to look at CO2 emissions is to look at REDUCTIONS of CO2 emissions. On that basis the US and Russia get gold stars for reducing their CO2 emissions. US emissions have gone down as we shifted from coal to NG for electrical power generation, and Russia's are down because a lot of factories closed down when the USSR collapsed.

The real question going forward is how to get MORE reductions in CO2 emissions. Clearly the voluntary measures in the Paris Accords didn't do it---we need a different approach. IMHO the best thing we could do is ditch the Paris Accords and go back to the original UN plan to craft a binding treaty that would require cuts in global CO2 emissions.

The US remains by a very long shot the country that is directly responsible for the largest total emissions of the gas that is plunging the earth into a permanent scorching heatwave...not what I'd call the most environmentally responsible nation on earth.

Everything being equal there are very few reasons to use a data set that is 16 years out of date. The two most likely reasons are rhetorical standing and pure laziness in updating the data set.

Sure the USA has produced a heck of a lot of CO2 over the 20th century, but time did not stop in 2002 and China passed the USA on total yearly emissions almost a decade ago. there cumulative number is still surely much lower, but they are now catching up with us fairly rapidly as they are producing more than we are. Germany has also undergone a serious CO2 emissions increase since the whole fiasco of Energiweinde was put into effect by replacing low CO2 nuclear with high CO2 coal. On the flip side the USA has closed a lot of old coal burners and switched many more to Natural Gas burning as well as building a lot of Natural Gas primary energy plants. Also the same pattern has taken place in the UK where coal has been almost entirely phased out in favor of Natural Gas for utility scale power plants.

Pretending none of these changes have taken place in the last 16 years is highly suspect.

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

From the above attitude statistics, compiled by scientists, it seems fairly convincing that there is a hard core of the American population, about 25%, who are beyond conviencing. Why this is I don’t know. But since 15% of milenials are I convienced the world is round while 2% are convienced it is flat (Scientific American) it’s fairly clear that the debate on climate change has an extreamly high acceptance rate among those open to persuasion.

There is a segment who can not, and will not ever be convienced. Time to move on.

Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a "gold standard" level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday.

"Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals," the U.S.-led team wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change of satellite measurements of rising temperatures over the past 40 years.

They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth's surface had reached a "five-sigma" level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming.

Such a "gold standard" was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.

Benjamin Santer, lead author of Monday's study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he hoped the findings would win over sceptics and spur action.

"The narrative out there that scientists don't know the cause of climate change is wrong," he told Reuters. "We do."

Using statistics to determine validity of climate change is simply playing into the hands of the deniers. There is nothing stochastic about climate change. It is a pure deterministic process. One sigma or a billion sigma are irrelevant. Accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere leads to fundamental climate change. These gases have a single signed response only. Energy is accumulating in the ocean-atmosphere-land system.

Another way to look at it is: the longer we wait the more sigma will be accumulated in the confidence bounds. The noise (variability) is not a causal factor and does not represent any fundamental non-deterministic process.

...The massive analysis shows that meeting the 2.00 C target is exceptionally difficult in all but the most optimistic climate scenarios. One pathway is to immediately and aggressively pursue carbon-neutral energy production by 2030 and hope that the atmosphere's sensitivity to carbon emissions is relatively low, according to the study. If climate sensitivity is not low, the window to a tolerable future narrows and in some scenarios, may already be closed.

... If the climate sensitivity is greater than 3.00K (median of assumed distribution), the pathway to a tolerable future is likely already closed.